


one step at a time

by TheNightbloodSolution



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Implied Bellamy Blake/Clarke Griffin, No Romance, Post-Season/Series 04, Suicide Attempt, i missed my son so i wrote him back to life, like it's lowkey but also it's not, not graphic or anything but it's there so just a warning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-27
Updated: 2018-08-27
Packaged: 2019-07-03 10:44:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,698
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15817299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheNightbloodSolution/pseuds/TheNightbloodSolution
Summary: “Will you come with?” She asks, and while his voice may have hardened, hers still cracks.To both his and her disbelief, he nods. “We’re the last two people alive on Earth.” A pause. “Well, above ground anyway. And I’ll be damned if I let the last person on Earth be Clarke Griffin.”---Or: the Post-S4 AU where Jasper and Clarke learn to survive together. Maybe even live.





	one step at a time

**Author's Note:**

> So this, like most of my fics, came out of nowhere. It's 2500+ words of me missing Jasper Jordan, so there's that. In terms of logistics, I did zero research so it's probably very implausible, I just wanted Jasper to survive and Clarke not to be alone after the end of the world and this is what came of it. Also, Madi just kind of doesn't exist in this fic.

He’s against the floor when she finds him, not moving. Shadows are cast over his face and orange light bounces around as Praimfaya threatens closer and closer.

She’s still thinking, frantically thinking about them. They left without her. He left without her. And she’s so glad. They’re going to be safe; they’re going to live.

But Jasper might not. He’s overdosed, it’s clear. She does CPR until her hands go numb. Chest compressions and breaths, over and over and over, all while the cloud of radiation draws nearer. She can’t stop to think about her friends, rocketing through space, not while Jasper is here, dying. She could leave him, she could stop and not hear him take his first renewed breath. She doesn’t have to drag him to Becca’s lab while radiation burns blister her own skin. She doesn’t have to inject him with her bone marrow before the radiation becomes too much and she collapses. But she does.

She’s selfish. And saving Jasper is a distraction.

* * *

 

He attempts suicide twice in the first month. The first time he cuts his wrists with one of Becca’s scalpels. The second time he isn’t nearly so elegant with the cut, using a forgotten shard of broken glass from when Abby smashed the radiation machine.

Clarke curses herself for not being more thorough, not finding all the different things he could hurt himself with.

In the first month, Clarke recreates the procedure her mother used to make her a nightblood, providing a more permanent solution for Jasper than her bone marrow transfusions. He struggles beneath her grasp as she injects him, saying he doesn’t want it, that he wants the radiation to take him, but ultimately, he lets her press the syringe into his bicep.

Saving someone who doesn’t want to be saved is hard, but Clarke is glad she has something to dedicate her time to.

* * *

 

Of all the people to get stuck with after the world ended, Clarke _would_ get stuck with the one who blamed her the most.

He told her how he felt some nights, called her a murderer, preached anti-genocide, threw the name “Wanheda” around with the nonchalance of someone who’d never had to pull the lever.

Some nights she told him to shove it. Other nights she said nothing, but silently agreed. She did all those things and yet here she was: living, while so many others were not.

Other nights still, Jasper was silent, too spent to be angry with Clarke. Or maybe he was never angry at her at all, but angry at the world, and she was the closest thing he could get to screaming at the entire Earth.

On day sixty-five, he tells her as much. There’s starting to run low on food supplies in the lab and they’ll have to leave, look for food elsewhere. Clarke thinks maybe the bunker will take them in if they can find it.

“Getting to Polis is going to be a trek, and if we want to have enough food for the journey we’ll have to leave soon. Not that you’ll want to go anyway.” She sneaks a glance at where he’s sitting, on the pad where the rocket launch area used to be. He’s picking at his cuticles and he doesn’t look up.

But he does respond.

“The great Clarke Griffin afraid to go it alone?”

“Yes.”

He looks up at her.

“I don’t want to be alone.” She continues.

“That’s how I’ve felt since Maya died.” He used to say her name with glassy eyes, but he’s hardened to that nostalgia. “I know you killed her. And I know you thought you had to.” His voice doesn’t break like it used to. “But I hate that the ground made us do any of it. I hate that I shot at the grounders on Unity Day and that we blew up the bridge. I hate that you irradiated Mount Weather and that Pike killed all those grounders. I just… I wanted to go back to living on the Ark so badly. Smoking with Monty and watching the same old movies they had on file over and over.”

“So, why didn’t you want to go to space with them?” She doesn’t mention them much.

“Because even if I went back, it doesn’t erase what we did.”

He’s right, and she knows it. But she can’t be alone. For as short a time as they’d been on the ground, she spent months of it alone, wandering forests and woods. Bare feet hitting Earth and berries coloring her hair to keep herself unknown. She had almost drowned in her thoughts back then. And if after the trek, they couldn’t get in the bunker or they couldn’t find any food, she dreads the thought of dying alone.

“Will you come with?” She asks, and while his voice may have hardened, hers still cracks.

To both his and her disbelief, he nods. “We’re the last two people alive on Earth.” A pause. “Well, above ground anyway. And I’ll be damned if I let the last person on Earth be Clarke Griffin.”

* * *

 

The bunker is a lost cause, completely covered in rubble. They attempt digging it out for a while, but eventually a collapse leaves the bunker door covered completely.

They do find a few hidden gems in Polis, including Maya’s iPod. For the first time since Praimfaya, Jasper allows himself to cry and he does it in Clarke’s arms. She strokes his head and she’s not sure if it’s comforting, but he doesn’t leave.

Later that night, when Jasper’s asleep, Clarke cradles part of Lexa’s throne (her new walking stick) and she cries too. No one holds her, but in the light of day she can be strong. For Jasper.

They find the rover not long after and it’s lucky, too. The first of the sandstorms hits not two days after they dig up the rover from the sand. Glass shards cut Clarke’s arm before she realizes that it’s not just sand blowing in the wind.

In the safety of the rover, Jasper tears some tattered fabric to cover Clarke’s wound and delivers some line about how this couldn’t possibly be Clarke’s fatal blow, but Clarke isn’t paying attention. She’s simply staring at his thin hands wrapping the cloth around her cut and thinking to herself, _he’s helping me_.

It’s the first time she thinks he might care about her, too.

It’s during that first sandstorm that she opens the glove compartment for the first time and finds Jasper’s letter to Monty.

She doesn’t read it, doesn’t feel entitled to, so she just hands it over to Jasper. He holds it for the first few hours of the storm, but he doesn’t read it. Eventually, he hands it back to her and gives her a small nod. She can read it if she wants.

She does.

She doesn’t like what she reads, but she thinks she might understand.

* * *

 

They find Eden a day after they’ve run out of food from the lab. Their lips are chapped from stumbling through the desert and Clarke’s eyes water as she sees the mass of undisturbed land that is Shallow Valley.

She thanks the gods aloud, calls it a miracle.

Jasper tells her there are no gods.

* * *

 

She’s not sure when she stopped saving him and they started saving each other.

When she left the lab, she thought living with Jasper would be one step up from dying alone, but in Eden, he does just as much work as her. She teaches him the Earth skills he neglected to learn after Mount Weather, like how to tend a fire, which berries are edible, which nuts _aren’t_ hallucinogenic (or, as he’d rather find out: which ones are).

They work into talking slowly. Simple fireside chats about what they’ve done with their days if they haven’t spent them together. They talk about how they might improve the valley, which structures they can repurpose. Clarke talks about her sketchpad and Jasper thinks he might try spearfishing.

When they spend their days together, they start talking too, mostly jokes, self-deprecating and existential from Jasper and not much better from Clarke.

Eventually, they talk about the past. First, it’s the light things. All the weed Jasper grew on the ark, the chess games Clarke played with Wells. The way Clarke drew all over her cell in solitary and the food fight Jasper started when the delinquents were still in the Skybox.

They talk about the dead next, the ones they’ve lost. Jasper and Mbege had been partners for all his Earth history projects. Monroe hung out with Clarke at her first Ark dance, while Wells was busy helping his father plan the annual Unity Day celebration. Clarke admits that she thought she loved Finn, but it was so fast she couldn’t be sure. Jasper says he doesn’t think he was ever in love, that he could’ve been with Maya, but there wasn’t enough time. Clarke says she loved Lexa. Jasper says he knows.

The development that takes the longest to talk about is them. The live ones. Or the ones they think are alive.

Jasper gives in first, because he’s gone over two hundred days without talking about Monty.

It comes out in one big rush, all the things he misses about his best friend. His smile, his laugh, the stupid self-five they always did. He misses making fun of his bowl cut and trading stories about how _cool_ it would be to go to Earth. He misses the way Monty could spend hours in Farm Station, just growing things. Jasper knew he never had the green thumb necessary to take over for his parents, but Monty was born for it.

“You know their food solution up there was Monty growing an algae farm, right?” Clarke says in response to his outburst.

“ _Just_ algae? For _five_ years?”

“Yup,” Clarke says, popping the p.

Jasper snorts. “Maybe we’re the lucky ones after all.”

With the barrier of the living crossed, the next day, Clarke tells Jasper how much she always loved her mom, even when she unquestionably hated her mom. The day after that she tells him that Raven was her first girl friend. On the Ark, though she’d be friendly with girls before, the only real friend she’d ever had was Wells. She tells him that she can still remember how whole she felt when she hugged Raven after returning from Mount Weather.

Finally, she tells Jasper that she fell in love. Slowly, without realizing it, she fell in love. She tells him that when she looks up at the night sky, sometimes the stars look like his freckles. She tells him how he wouldn’t let her pull the lever alone. She tells him how he never let her finish her sentence when she was about to admit that doom was imminent. She admits that she wishes could’ve told him how she felt.

Jasper says all the right things, tells her that she can still tell him when he comes down, jokes that the two of them were never subtle, but more than anything, he holds her while she cries.

Two hundred days ago, she devoted herself to saving him, but now he was saving her.

* * *

 

On the one-year anniversary of Praimfaya, Jasper announced that he was going to attempt Monty’s moonshine recipe.

Clarke helped him gather the ingredients, but internally, she was terrified that if he perfected it, she’d lose him. He’d go back to who he’d been in the months after Mount Weather: drunk, useless, broken.

Somehow, as bad as the batches Monty brewed had tasted, Jasper managed to make it taste inexplicably worse. But it was alcohol, and Clarke didn’t realize how much she had missed it.

They laugh more with the moonshine that night than either of them have in three hundred and sixty-five days.

The next day, both of them realize how much they want another drink, which is why they stop each other from brewing another batch. Maybe if they were alone, they’d both give in to the pull and drown their sorrows in moonshine, but somehow a tentative living situation had been reached between them. A situation that involved scavenging for new foods, nightly fireside conversations, and jokes made in poor taste. A situation that involved the two of them together, maybe not happy, but living.

* * *

 

Eventually they trust themselves enough to start brewing moonshine, not regularly, but sometimes.

Depending on how much they drink, Jasper might give an impromptu speech mocking Bellamy from the dropship days, or Clarke might burst into her off-key rendition of one of the songs off Maya’s iPod.

The alcohol that runs through her veins makes Clarke more open, and as much as she’ll never admit it, she likes to be open, vulnerable. It feels like release.

* * *

 

On day six hundred and eighty-two, Jasper rips up his letter to Monty.

“When he comes back, I want him to know that I didn’t give up.” He tells her.

Clarke waits until he’s turned his back to spill her tears of joy.

* * *

 

“What about them, do you think they’ll come back too?” She asks him, as she stares up at the sky. Day one thousand, two-hundred and fifty-four.

She’s glad she radios every day, because otherwise she doesn’t think she’d be able to keep track of the days.

Her hair is getting ridiculously long, almost reaching her butt. She’s growing it out because she has nothing better to do and it’s knotted and matted, but splayed around her as she’s lying down she thinks it looks kind of pretty. She thinks she might cut it soon because of the sheer weight.

“Absolutely. A year and a half.”

“That’s nothing. We’ve done three years, we can wait a little longer.”

* * *

 

They don’t come home after five years. There is no ship hurtling toward earth five years after Praimfaya, nor is there one five years and two months after Praimfaya, or five years and six months after Praimfaya.

Neither let’s the other lose hope, though.

“Still out there.”

“Just a little delayed.”

“They can’t give up Monty’s algae, it’s too delicious.”

“Raven will get them down.”

“They’ll get down here eventually, Murphy’s got to outlive all of us, the cockroach.”

“I still have hope.”

* * *

 

When the strange newcomers get ahold of Clarke, Jasper panics. He’s not sure how to breathe, the world he’s come to know so well in the past six years sways around him, out of focus, more a mass of colors than an abundance of trees and plants.

Clarke sacrificed herself as they ran, knowing she was hurt and couldn’t keep up. Because that was Clarke. Always sacrificing, always putting herself last. He’d figured that out about her so long ago, but he hadn’t experienced it until now.

She told him she loved him before she let herself get caught. And he loved her, too. Not romantically, they both knew that. And not the way you love someone just because you’ve been stuck with them for six years. The way they loved each other was born out of understanding, of being sent down on the dropship together, of saving Jasper from a spear in the chest, of knowing Clarke would always save her people, of acknowledging Jasper’s pain after Mount Weather. It was love born out of understanding of each other.

A noise startles Jasper back into the reality. It’s a ship, another one, coming down. He doesn’t need his rifle scope to tell him that this one is different from the ship that came down before, the one painted with the word “Eligius.” This one is smaller and with a pang in his chest, he knows who it is.

And he runs.

* * *

 

He trembles when he pulls the trigger to shoot the men surrounding the descended ship, but he knows he has to. He has to save friends. It’s what Clarke would do.

“Jasper?” Bellamy’s voice rasps as he steps into the clearing.

Jasper looks every one of them in the eye, lingering the longest on Monty, before he brings his eyes back to meet Bellamy’s.

“Clarke and I knew you would come.”

“Clarke’s alive?”


End file.
